In the reading “B-Roll explained to photographers” by Jose Antunes, I learned about B-roll, a secondary, yet essential component in the video that we typically neglect. A video story contains two elements: an A-Roll, the main element, achieving your goal of the story and a B-Roll, the secondary element, enriching and fulfilling the main story. Jose’s example is that if we want a biography film, A-Roll captures interviewee answering questions, while B-Roll captures them doing activities or their workspace to supplement the content they mentioned during the interview.
We follow this useful idea by planing the storyboard in advance, which helps us avoid missing B-Roll components. Since the goal of our footage is to represent our client and how our assistive tech helps her solve her problem, we recorded her interview and her testing our product. For the B-Roll component, we planned to record surrounding areas near where she lives to illustrate how this environment causes difficulty for her. Moreover, to prepare for the B-Roll record, we will go over an interview and list what she brought up that might require B-Roll pieces to make audiences, who don’t have the necessary background knowledge, understand.
Another useful tip for this process is to shoot the video for at least 30 seconds. I totally agree when I consider my past experiences with editing videos. During the editing process, the transition animation, at the beginning and end, takes around 10 seconds. Moreover, I sometimes make mistakes at the beginning and end of the video, requiring more trimming to be done, so having 30 seconds minimum is a good criterion.
In conclusion, my group learned about A-Roll and B-Roll for the first time from this reading. We find it helpful to plan how we will record A-Roll and B-Roll scenes ahead of time.